Sean Dietrich
You’re a farmer in the Middle Ages. We’re talking 1000 A.D.-ish. Actually, they don’t call you a farmer but a “yeoman,” which is an antiquated way of saying, “you shovel excrement for a living.”
Maybe you live in Scotland. Maybe France. England, Portugal, Africa, wherever. Either way, your life is unfulfilling.
Sure, you have a great family. You have great friends. You are even allowed to drink beer for breakfast because this is what everyone does during the Middle Ages, even clergy and toddlers. So that’s pretty great.
Even so, underneath it all, there is something going on inside you. You can’t explain what you’re experiencing.
Centuries later, psychologists will invent clinical names for your feelings. They’ll call it a major “climacteric,” or the “need for self-actualization,” or God forbid, a “midlife crisis.”
But in the Middle Ages there are no psychological doctors. There are only doctors whose entire medical practice consists of drilling holes into people’s skulls in hopes of curing a runny nose.
Sean Dietrich
Still, you can’t explain this pulling sensation inside. It’s tugging you somewhere. But where? You keep wondering whether you were made for more than just paying bills. Weren’t you made to be more than just a serf?
And isn’t life about more than just pleasure and fun? Having fun is great. But fun doesn’t exactly make your cup runneth all over the placeth.
You have a few options for spiritual guidance. You could visit your local monastery, but the monks will just instruct you to say 25 Hail Marys and call it a day. Likewise, you could visit the doctor, who just bought a new cordless drill.
Then, one day you hear about this place in northwestern Spain, hundreds of miles from your home. It’s a cathedral, built upon the grave of an apostle.
People from all over the world are traveling to this sacred place. Farmers and peasants. Lords and ladies. Rich and poor.
Immediately, you’re thinking, “That’s it! I must go there!” The next morning, you’ve already packed your satchel. You tell your wife that you’re walking to walk to Spain.
Um. What? Your wife freaks out. Spain? What about your life? What about your farm? No more breakfast beer for you, pal.
“But I must go,” you insist. “I must walk the Camino de Santiago.”
So your wife says, “Well, then I’m going with you.”
You both leave on foot. You become pilgrims. Your full-time job is walking. You sleep alongside the highway. You eat the food of charity, for you have no money.
After months of walking, you arrive at your destination. But by then, you have already had a huge realization. Your cup is indeed runnething all over, but it’s not the cathedral that made it overflow. Neither is it the bones of some dead guy.
It was the walk. It was simply moving your feet. Sweating in the sunlight alongside strangers who all wanted the same thing you did. God.
It was time spent with your wife. It was the strange magic that helped you on your path, as though the universe had conspired to help you succeed.
Above all, it was the fact that you took your own spirit, your own heart so seriously, that you did not just let it die of neglect.
In five days, I’ll be taking that same journey.